


What Will We Do (With A Drunken Sailor)

by red_starshine



Series: Holidays With Chas & Constantine [3]
Category: Constantine (TV), Hellblazer & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drinking, Drinking & Talking, Drunken Confessions, M/M, Secret Relationship, St. Patrick's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 18:34:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3539765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/red_starshine/pseuds/red_starshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Right. We survived, the evil beastie’s dead, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, we’re going to a pub.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Will We Do (With A Drunken Sailor)

**Author's Note:**

> Hi Zed!
> 
> Not beta-ed, so un-Britpicked John.

John threw the severed head of a ram-like demon, its horns long and black and curling, into the small bonfire Chas had hastily put together with dry brittled branches and John’s lighter. The head withered and blackened in the flames as the fire crackled, embers drifting up. Chas stood nearby, expertly hacking the rest of the demon’s body into smaller pieces with his large knife on a wooden picnic table.

Zed stood nearby with a bucket of holy water, watching Chas and John quickly dispose of the demon’s body. When the last hoof had vanished into the fire, John said a quick spell and then looked at Zed.

Zed poured the holy water over the fire. A loud screech echoed through the small clearing as the fire was extinguished.

John wiped his hands on his pants. “Right. We survived, the evil beastie’s dead, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, we’re going to a pub.” He still had a streak of black blood down the front of his shirt that he hid by buttoning up his trench coat, which was no more grimy than usual. "All in favor?"

“I’m game,” said Chas, wiping the demon’s blood from his knife with a paper towel. “Zed?”

“Sure, why not?” said Zed, handing the bucket back to John, who dropped it into the trunk of Chas’s cab. “It’ll be fun.”

Chas’s unerring sense of direction brought them to a small suburban town halfway between where they’d caught the demon in Roswell, Georgia and the millhouse in Atlanta. There was a stretch of street that had bars and pubs and restaurants on both sides, some upscale and expensive, others dank and cramped but cheap. John had immediately gravitated towards the smallest, grimiest, and loudest place on the block.

John, Chas, and Zed crowded around a small table near the window looking onto the street. A small band was shoved into one corner near the bar, consisting of four middle-aged men singing and playing traditional Irish songs on mandolins and acoustic guitars.

The bar at the other end of the room was surrounded by people drinking and talking, the conversations blending together into a pleasant hum of noise.

John visibly relaxed as he looked around the bar. “Almost like home,” he said with a smirk, waving over a waitress to order a round of beers. “Just needs two punters slamming each other over the head with pint glasses and yelling about football matches and it’ll be like I never left England.”

The waitress arrived at their table, her curly brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. She placed three menus on the table. “Hi there. What can I get you?”

“Three pints of your cheapest, roughest brews, luv,” said John with a smile.

The waitress nodded, scrawling something in her notepad. “Okay, I’ll be right back with your drinks.”

Zed picked up one of the menus. “They have corned beef and cabbage,” said Zed, pointing towards the specials board hanging nearby. “That’s Irish, right?”

John rolled his eyes. “I’d rather eat haggis before I ate boiled cabbage willingly,” he said. “At least that’d taste like _something_.”

“What's haggis?” asked Zed.

“Sheep’s stomach stuffed with entrails and spices,” said Chas blandly. “And oddly enough, not part of any occult ritual that I’m aware of. It’s a traditional Scottish dish.”

The waitress reappeared with three tall pint glasses and set them down on the table.

“Cheers,” said John, holding out his pint glass. Chas and Zed clinked them together.

Zed had never gone on a bar crawl with Chas and John before, and was a little surprised at how quickly they both finished their first pint. Beer wasn’t her alcoholic drink of choice, she usually preferred something sweeter, so she continued to nurse her first pint while Chas flagged down another waitress for their second round.

“It’s not a race, guys,” she said with bemusement as the waitress came over and placed two more amber pints on the coasters in front of John and Chas.

“’Course it is,” said John dryly, picking up the pint glass. “I’m an Englishman, have to prove I can outdrink this American amateur. It’s a matter of national pride.”

Chas good-naturedly rolled his eyes. “That’s adorable, John.”

“Yeah?” said John, taking a sip of his pint. “Bet you won’t be sayin’ that when Zed and I are draggin’ your sorry arse out of here at closing time.”

The gauntlet had been thrown down.

Chas leaned over the table towards John, their faces less than a foot apart. “You’re going down, Constantine,” he rumbled in a low voice, his eyes boring into John's.

John was quiet for a moment. “We’ll see about that,” he said, recovering quickly.

Zed hid her smile behind her hand and pretended not to notice the faint red that’d appeared on John’s cheeks.

Oh yeah. There was definitely something was going on between John and Chas.

She’d suspected for a while, watching them in the millhouse. There were the fairly obvious clues, like how John had a tendency to go to bed at night in his own room but emerge from Chas’s when morning came. There were also more subtle cues, like how much more often Chas just touched John, on the shoulder, the arm, than when she’d first come to the millhouse, or how John could get Chas to turn bright red just by looking at him when he thought Zed wasn’t paying attention to them. (She was.)

It was kind of sweet, honestly, although she was sure John would set himself on fire if she told him that to his face.

***

John: ten pints down, Chas: twelve.

John was incredibly drunk, while Chas was only moderately sloshed. If John hadn’t stopped to heckle the band (“Enough of those bloody sea shanties, play ‘Pretty Vacant’!”, which had gotten him a blank stare from all but one of the musicians, who briefly wove the distinctive opening riff to ‘Pretty Vacant’ into his mandolin part for ‘Black Vevet Band’) or attempt to refill an empty pint glass with magic, which Chas had quickly and effectively put a stop to, he might’ve kept up better with Chas, who kept knocking back the pints with machine-like efficiency. 

Zed had long ago abandoned her own pint and switched to soda, realizing that someone was going to have to drive Chas’s cab back to the millhouse and the other two wouldn’t be in any condition to get behind the wheel of a car after this.

“So. Admit defeat yet?” said Chas to John after he’d finished the thirteenth pint of beer.

“Never,” slurred John, unsteadily holding out his eleventh pint towards Chas.

Chas smirked and clinked his empty glass against John’s. “That’s what I like about you the most,” said Chas. “Your goddamn stubborn refusal to give up.”

John tipped back his pint. “Aw, love you too, mate,” he said, the words running together but still understandable.

“Yeah?” said Chas, ducking his head down slightly. The back of his neck turned red.

John attempted to place one hand over Chas’s. When their hands finally touched, John gave him a small squeeze. “From the bottom of my withered and blackened little heart.”

Chas’s face split into a genuinely warm smile.

John’s eyes slid over to Zed, as if suddenly remembering she was sitting there. He looked like a deer frozen in the middle of a road about to be struck down by an oncoming car.

Zed couldn’t help but laugh, putting down her soda so she wouldn’t choke on it. “Oh my God. You really think I didn’t know?”

“You knew?” said John far too innocently. “Knew what?”

“John, it’s OK,” said Chas. He turned towards Zed, looking slightly embarrassed. “Sorry, Zed. It wasn’t supposed to be a secret; we just weren’t sure how to tell you.”

“Why are you apologizing to me?” Zed asked Chas curiously, picking up her soda again. “It’s not like I’m mad or anything.” And she wasn’t. John and Chas had been mindful of her desire to keep her own secrets, why should she insist they tell her theirs?

Chas shrugged. “’Cause we should’ve mentioned it instead of sneaking around. This thing between the two of us just kind of...happened.”

John gave a loud snort. “For you, maybe.”

Chas rolled his eyes. “Right, for me.”

“Chas, it’s really none of my business,” said Zed with a shrug. “I mean, I don’t mind that you’re telling me now, it’s nice to know I wasn’t reading too much into things, but I wasn’t going to demand every single deta--”

Zed was interrupted by John’s head hitting the wooden table with a solid thunk.

“Lightweight,” muttered Chas with a smirk, sipping his pint. He playfully thumped John’s back. John groaned but didn’t move.

“Chas, I think you won,” said Zed with a small smile, pulling out her wallet and dropping several $20s on the table. “ C’mon, let’s get him into the cab.”


End file.
